There are women in negligées and underwear extracted from the pages of French lingerie magazines of the 1950s. These may be ‘femmes folles de leur corps’, as Karl Marx adds in a footnote to Capital (Chapter II, ‘The Process of Exchange’), comparing commodities with women, citing a twelfth-century French poet who come across ‘wanton’ women among other goods on view and for purchase at a fair. The women look away for the most part, though some meet the viewer’s regard full on. Some look down, while others hide their faces, but not in shame, despite the very feminine mode of display, which some might consider as masquerade (posing as a woman while being something else, as in any act assumed to be a seduction). In the magazines the women are models, objects that carry another object to the market-place.
She promenades between the rows of slaves and the merchandise [...] I am not a
woman, but a world. My clothes need only fall away for you to discover in my
person one continuous mystery […]. Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony
The Foxes, naturalised (as the French say – that is, more natural than Nature, and become good citizens) carry silk negligées in their jaws and paws, while mounted on plinths, elevated. It is unclear if they are the liberators of the women or if there has been an act of violence, wrenching the garment from a body or bodies by force, if they are taking away the silky garments, performing an exchange that the women – if they are commodities – cannot do for themselves. The foxes, too, are things, objects rather than the animate beings they were once, yet they are brought again to life in this new encounter, capricious, sportive, endowed with life, like wanton women. Perhaps they are going to the market on their own, in their own right, and if so, then social organisation is subject to change (if the dead, animal or woman, starts to speak, moves, acts).
In the midst of the foxes and surrounded by the women, a vitrine contains four books: English and German versions of Capital, opened at the page of the footnote to Chapter II, and Sigmund Freud’s work on sexuality, more precisely his essay of 1927, on the fetish. This is another haunting, perhaps, a ghost motif magnified by the silver and mother of pearl-handled glasses that would allow a closer reading, a reading in detail.
Reading and politics are evoked and feminised, draped in silk or satin, befurred, charmed and charming.